Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization - Softcover

Huggan, Graham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472050729 ISBN 13: 9780472050727

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2009

Synopsis

Recent figures suggest that there will be 1.6 billion arrivals at world airports by the year 2020. Extreme Pursuits looks at the new conditions of global travel and the unease, even paranoia, that underlies them---at the opportunities they offer for alternative identities and their oscillation between remembered and anticipated states. Graham Huggan offers a provocative account of what is happening to travel at a time characterized by extremes of social and political instability in which adrenaline-filled travelers appear correspondingly determined to take risks. It includes discussions of the links between tourism and terrorism, of contemporary modes of disaster tourism, and of the writing that derives from these; but it also confirms the existence of more responsible forms of travel/writing that demonstrate awareness of a chronically endangered world. Extreme Pursuits is the first study of its kind to link travel writing explicitly with structural changes in the global tourist industry. The book makes clear that travel writing can no longer take refuge in the classic distinctions (traveler versus tourist, foreigner versus native) on which it previously depended. Such distinctions---which were dubious in the first place---no longer make sense in an increasingly globalized world. Huggan argues accordingly that the category "travel writing" must include experimental ethnography and prose fiction; that it should concern itself with other kinds of travel practices, such as those related to Holocaust deportation and migrant labor; and that it should encompass representations of travelers and "traveling cultures" that appear in popular media, especially TV and film. Graham Huggan is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds. He is the coauthor, with Patrick Holland, of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (University of Michigan Press) and coauthor, with Helen Tiffin, of Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Routledge). Illustration: "Shadow Wall," 2006 © Shaun Tan.

About this title

About the Author

Graham Huggan is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds. He is the coauthor, with Patrick Holland, of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (University of Michigan Press) and coauthor, with Helen Tiffin, of Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Routledge).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

EXTREME PURSUITS

Travel/Writing in an Age of GlobalizationBy GRAHAM HUGGAN

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2009University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-05072-7

Contents

Preface: In Transit..................................1One * WTS AND THE WTO................................12Two * GOING GREEN, SAVING NATURE.....................52Three * UN/NATURAL DISASTERS.........................99Four * BACK TO THE FUTURE............................133Postscript: After Bali...............................170Notes................................................181Works Cited..........................................197Index................................................209

Chapter One

WTs and the WTO

Introduction

That the World Tourism Organization and the World Trade Organization share the same acronym can hardly be said to be a coincidence; tourism, after all, is nothing if not big business, and that business is conducted, increasingly, on a global scale. Tourism is the product of a globalized modernity characterized by spiralling patterns of consumption, and by the rapid emergence of a system of cultural and economic interconnections that has actively contributed toward the creation of a single-global-"tourist space" (Meethan, 37). The impact of globalization on tourism has been, unsurprisingly, considerable. Critics have pointed out the homogenizing effect of globalization on tourism, leading to the establishment of a series of more or less interchangeable "packaged environments" (Goldstone) in which tourists can enjoy their leisure with a maximum of predictability and a minimum of risk. Yet it is also clear that globalization generates as many differences as similarities, and that these produce a suitably differentiated tourism. One example is the expansion of niche markets (e.g., within the range of "responsible" tourism) as a function of a deregulated post-Fordist political economy (Meethan, 56); another is the increasing privatization of the notion of the public heritage site. Globalization has been a driving force for the diversification of the tourist industry, which in turn provides a valuable resource for the creation and maintenance of cultural distinctiveness in many different regions of what still remains-and tourism admittedly contributes here as well-an unevenly developed world (162).

Two aspects of globalization have made a particularly significant impact on tourism over the last half century. These aspects can be loosely gathered under the headings the economization of culture and the indigenization of modernity. The economization of culture-its transformation into saleable commodity-is frequently considered to be one of the salient features of late-capitalist modernity, providing incontrovertible evidence of the worldwide commodification of all aspects of social and cultural life. Tourism is a test case for the conspicuous consumption integral to contemporary capitalism; it registers an immediately recognizable "extension of the commodification of modern social life" (Meethan, 4). The global branding of culture has obviously negative resonances, as in what Patricia Goldstone calls the "kitschification of cultural traditions" that results when local cultures are remodeled for global distribution, and when cultural authenticity-always a top tourist attraction-is refashioned for quick sale (224). On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that such processes may be beneficial-and not just economically-to local cultures that, adapting swiftly to the "give-and-take of globalization" (Meethan, 128), are able to negotiate a favorable position for themselves within the global markets that increasingly, if by no means exclusively, regulate the modern dynamics of cross-cultural transaction and exchange. Tourism, in this context, acts as a catalyst for the transformation, not the dissolution, of locality; and for the strategic (re)indigenization of a global modernity no longer masterminded or monopolized-if it ever was-by the West. What this suggests is that it is far too simplistic to see tourism as a product of hegemonic Western supply-and-demand models, and non-Western peoples as happy/hapless consumers of imposed Western goods. Rather, tourism illustrates that "the process[es] of cultural commodification, like capitalism itself, [are] now played out on the global stage and in some cases ... irreducibly associated with the dynamic interplay between politics and markets, or attempts to harness the[se] markets for political ends" (Meethan, 135).

Globalization involves the restructuring of space, not just the sum of its various (social/political/economic) interconnections; it also implies the development of a global consciousness, for example, in matters of the environment, social justice, and human rights (Meethan, 34). Global consciousness, or something like it, lies behind the development of new forms of sustainable tourism (ecotourism, agritourism, and so forth) although, as subsequent chapters of this book will illustrate, these forms are eminently co-optable by capitalism, characterized today more than it ever was by the relentless drive to create new markets and by the self-given right to use other people's rights to its own ends. Global consciousness is also the property of a relatively new kind of modern world traveler, both indulgent participant in and ironic analyst of marketed "cultures," both shocked witness to and shameless purveyor of global tourism's extensive range of retailed cultural goods. This type of traveler is less likely to go in search of unsullied local cultures than to enjoy-with strategic interruptions for tongue-in-cheek moral disapproval-the new transcultural hybrids thrown up by the impact of current processes of economic and cultural globalization on local tourist space.

An obvious example of this kind of world traveler is Pico Iyer, the epitome of the traveler as cosmopolitan speedster, globalization's accelerated equivalent to the modern urban flneur. Iyer, in many respects, will be the key figure of this chapter, not least because his writing brings together several of the specific issues and concerns surrounding globalization that are a feature, more generally, of this book. These issues and concerns can be framed here in terms of a series of irresolvable dilemmas. One dilemma is political: how can the world be "made safe for tourism" (Goldstone) in an age of extreme instability? Globalization, after all, in unraveling the apparent certainties of state, territory, and identity, has arguably helped produce a climate of suspicion, even paranoia, in which ancient political enmities have been intensified, and (imagined) threats are countered by the increasing polarization of private and public space (O'Tuathail, 254). Another is cultural: how can tourism-as-commerce thrive when the very idea of otherness on which it depends is apparently endangered? If cultures are no longer seen as bounded entities but rather as relays chosen from a global-cultural repertoire, what future is there for "exotic" travel, in whichever corner of the world? When everyone is a traveler-albeit a different kind of traveler-then what future is there for the "exotic" travel book? Following on from this, another dilemma is ontological. Who, exactly, is a traveler? Is travel writing still defined by the privilege of movement-a privilege embodied in the capacity for world travel-or are there other possibilities for travel writing: counternarratives of modernity; travel narratives "from below"? And where is the traveler, for that matter? If travelers are increasingly seen as inhabiting a global space, how then are they to orient themselves? What happens when one global space stands in for another; when the city, for example, becomes a globe in itself, a microcosmic "travel world"? (Kaur and Hutnyk). Or what happens when the real and virtual spaces of travel intermingle, creating "fantasies of limitless choice" (Strain, 233) of the order provided by cybertravel: not just where do I want to go, but who do I want to be today? Finally, there is an ethical dilemma posed by these choices, as perhaps there always has been for travelers. If, in an unevenly developed global culture, "the right to travel is only for those with the right credentials to travel" (Kaur and Hutnyk, 3), how should that right be exercised responsibly? How should it be shared? Should it be exercised at all?

Some of these questions resonate across the body of Iyer's writing, with several coming together in his ambitious 2000 travelog The Global Soul. I propose a close reading of this text before proceeding to analyze a different kind of late twentieth-century travel vehicle: the Australian filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke's ethically saturated ethnographic documentaries, Cannibal Tours (1988) and The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991). There are similarities, however; for in O'Rourke's work, as in Iyer's, the inescapable realities of globalization lead to an interrogation of the status of the cultural other in which otherness is dispersed but the problem of cultural voyeurism is arguably exacerbated rather than erased. The touristic consumption of the other is either filtered through the ubiquitous pseudo-anthropological trope of cannibalism (Cannibal Tours) or sublimated in repressed sexual desire (The Good Woman of Bangkok), allowing in both cases for an analysis of global tourism in terms of colonialist fantasies of containment and mastery in a postcolonial space. These fantasies are then applied to a set of readings of the modern global city, registered both from allegedly inside and outside perspectives, in which the boundaries are symptomatically blurred between the city as a "dwelling" and a "traveling" space. Cosmopolitanism provides the link between these spaces, with the worldly figure of the cosmopolitan being challenged by a consideration of its unwanted mirror-image, the refugee. Finally, in a coda I will examine another figure of global travel, the virtual traveler, whose "distanced immersion" (Strain, 233) provides an alternative model by which the increasingly disoriented global traveler can regain an illusory sense of mastery over culture and space.

Global Souls

In The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (2000), Pico Iyer reproduces the slightly queasy combination of too-cool-for-school postmodernism and bleeding-heart sentimentality that were characteristic of much of his earlier travel writing, particularly his entertaining whistle-stop tour of South and Southeast Asia, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988). As in the earlier work, Iyer tends to replicate the shallow commercialism he claims to critique, both in the content of his writing and, especially, its form, an immediately identifiable mixture of up-market shopping catalog and glossy tourist brochure. It would be easy enough to see Iyer as one of his own spoilt "diplobrat[s]" (Iyer, 196), winging round the world on CNN and Time magazine's expenses, the corporate hack as global philosopher. Yet this would be to trivialize the deeper search underlying Iyer's expense-account cosmopolitanism, one identified in the opening chapter in terms of the unresolved effort to "preserve a sense of universality in a world that [is] apt to define unity in more divisive ways" (22). Globalism and universalism, Iyer insists throughout the book, are not the same thing, with the former often acting as little more than an alibi for the worst excesses of the free market and the latter defining, rather, a measured way of seeing and living "beyond petty allegiances and labels," in the free-floating manner of an Emersonian "universal soul" (17). "All the globalism in the world," he says ruefully, "does not add up to universalism"; indeed, globalism might be seen as an impediment to universalism insofar as it stunts the shared human aspirations on which universalism erects itself, turning the world into a playground for "those who have no one to play with" (244)-a "benign empire" in thrall to multinational capitalism and the media, dedicated to corporate commerce but still projecting the image of an "ideal Oversoul" (179).

Iyer's primary metaphor for this "benign empire" is the Olympic Games, which he sees as exemplifying the contradictory goals of massmarket globalism and human solidarity, these being fused in a festival of skin-deep patriotism in which the fact that "the flag is ... eclipsed by the logo" (209) merely confirms a global order given over to corporate image-making-one in which an accumulation of brand names, "more and more a floating currency," have eventually succeeded in turning the Olympics from universal peace movement into global stock exchange (193). Aptly, Iyer's sharp analysis of the "corporate optimism" and "bottom-line internationalism" (197) underlying the modern-day Olympic Games focuses on the much-criticized 1996 Games in Atlanta, a largely anodyne and unprepossessing venue that became, for two weeks, the unlikely setting for the "greatest planetary show on earth" (178). Atlanta, for Iyer, is a non-place, "a futuristic, globally linked web of terminals surrounded for as far as the eye could see by untamed wilderness" (206), a "would-be global city" (215) repeatedly betraying its own provincialism, and caught in the "empty space that lies between [corporate] globalism and true universalism" (214). Iyer's descriptions of Atlanta follow the pattern of contemporary anti-travel writing, which operates on the ironic principle that the best places to visit are often those in which there is nothing much to see:

Atlanta at first sight looked like nowhere on earth: suburb led to interstate led to off-ramp led to suburb. I passed an Economy Inn, a Quality Inn, a Comfort Inn, a Days Inn; I passed a Holiday Inn Select, which gave way, soon enough, to a Holiday Inn Express. On every side of me were look-alike office blocks and landscaped driveways, mirror-glass buildings and office parks: all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial. (185)

If Atlanta is a global city at all, it is global by virtue of being featureless, "as if a city had been replaced by a scenic functional base as picturesque and not quite real as the forests you see on the background of personal checks" (186). Its globalism is a function of the rhetoric of corporate improvement, ironically aspiring to a grandeur of scale and a unity of purpose its segregated social system ensures will never exist. Far from embodying the dream of its most famous son, Martin Luther King, the city is racially riven and, in places, desperately impoverished, full of abandoned houses and boarded-up storefronts and "kids hawking T-shirts of the black-power salute at the '68 Olympics, and people [just] walking around and looking lost" (189). In a nice touch, Iyer, sitting on the porch outside King's home, looks down the street to the Ritz-Carlton, touted as the "tallest hotel in the hemisphere," and watches men "sashaying blearily down the side streets, in and out of their shotgun houses," near where Iyer's car is "precariously parked, a block beyond the sign that said FREEDOM WALK ENDS" (189).

Atlanta, for Iyer, parades its globalism as a gloss over deep-South intolerance and parochialism; as such, it is not an untypical Olympic venue, a not-quite-world-city riding the crest of its own pushy corporate image and "desperately attempt[ing] to prove itself a major global player" by shunting its own social problems temporarily offstage (183-84). The Games themselves are an example of "the global market hover[ing] over the global village" and threatening to swallow it whole, as emblematized in Atlanta's most famous corporate symbol, Coke (217). However, what is most striking about the Games is not their glib commercialism but the counterpoint they provide to an equally specious cosmopolitanism that, buoyed up by the "happy globalist" (During) ideal of living without attachments, provides Iyer's self-ironizing recipe for the unfettered Global Soul (140).

Perhaps the best example of this in the book is in the chapter on Hong Kong, which Iyer sees as a quintessential global city where just about everything-and, by implication, just about everyone-can be bought and sold from just about everywhere else. Hong Kong is a haven for the Global Soul in his (and it is nearly always "his") worldly avatar as mobile yuppie-a place apparently modeled after the postmodern "city-state as transit lounge" (96), and an ideal stopover for the class of roving "flexecutives"-another of Iyer's deliberately trite neologisms (85)-more than half of whose lives seem to be spent suspended in midair (84). An ideal opportunity, as well, for Iyer to stockpile some more postmodern/globalist clichs, as in the Worldwide Building, a faceless "shopping-mall-cum-conference-center-cum-world trade-center," which stands in metonymically for a city that is "less a capital of empire than an empire of capital," operating on the twin principles of fusion culture and free trade (96-97).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472050729
• ISBN 13: 9780472050727
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224